Yesterday\’s cold snap caused a pipe in my grandfather\’s house to burst. The basement flooded and the plaster in the ceiling collapsed, along with one of the book shelves below. When I saw him earlier in the day, he was huddled in the sunshine that poured through the southern facing living room windows, wearing three sweaters and a knitted snow cap. This is a man who is physically cold year round, but I know no one who has ever had a heart as warm and loving as his. It\’s been more than a rough year for him, but then, many of his years have been. He outlived the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918, the Great Depression, three separate floods in Pennsylvania that twice wiped out his family\’s furniture making shop, the infant death of his first son, being deployed for WWII, the grief behind the circumstances of the birth of his first daughter, his only living son being permanently scarred by Viet Nam, the suicide of his closest brother, and on and on and on…
Somehow I feel that most of us don\’t live lives like that anymore, now that we have our digital television recorders, our constant internet access, our iPods, our cell phones, our cars and countless possessions. Seems like most of us have given up actual living for replications of life. Substituting first hand experience for the Wikipedia point of view. Eschewing our own encounters for the facsimiles of other\’s emotions and life events (\”real,\” a la Fahrenheit 451 or \”fake,\” a la The O.C.) that will play back at our own convenience. When we schedule everything from giving birth to visiting a professional to have the shit sucked out of you, all in the name of simplifying our hectic lives in order to have time to enjoy our free time, when, exactly, do we have free time left to enjoy? If you can\’t even take the time to revel in the small joys of an autonomous day to day activity like letting out your own excrement without taking a pill or drinking a chalky fluid or sticking a tube up your ass to \”naturally enhance\” the flow of your own body\’s waste system… well, what then? If you can\’t even shit on your own (and by the chatter on cell phones that goes on in the stalls next to me in public restrooms, I know that many of you can\’t) then what, pray tell, can you do? This isn\’t life. This isn\’t even something like it. It\’s a bad parody of neuroticism.
Give me the Spanish flu over personality enhancement products any day. Some days I find myself holding back from ripping the white ear buds or tiny cell phones from the sixty percent of people I see every day. Entertainment is not a substitute for personality or happiness. I miss the sounds of silence.
